The Fundamentals of Data Redaction (2024)

The value of data isn’t lost on anyone. Be it small businesses or large corporations, every organization needs data in order to monitor their performance, have a look at their competitors’ business, identify loopholes or weaknesses, and also decide how you can expand or improve your operations. Along with this data also comes a ton of responsibility to keep it secure, which is something that keeps data managers and security experts up all night.

There are several types of businesses in which there is a need to store and process sensitive information, particularly when it comes to personally identifiable information (PII). This refers to information that can be used to identify a person, directly or indirectly.

One of the best ways to do so is through data redaction, which is one of the most effective methods in data security. It can be just what you need to safeguard your company from a data breach, which can hurt your credibility.

In this guide, you will learn:

• What is Data Redaction?
• Data Redaction vs. Data Masking
• Can Redacted Data be Restored?
• Benefits of Data Redaction
• Static vs Dynamic Redaction

This is a part of our comprehensive data masking guide.

Data redaction is a method used to protect sensitive data from being compromised or leaked. It involves the removal of particular pieces of data from the whole of it, in an effort to keep it from being exposed as a whole and used for malicious or nefarious purposes.

You might have heard the term ‘redacted information’ in movies or classified documentation where some of the information is blacked out. The same principle is applied in the process of data redaction.

Basically, this process breaks down data into various pieces of information, and removes or hides portions that can be used to identify or link to a particular person, company, or organization. For instance, if you have credit card information of your customers stored in your database, you may choose to redact the first names of all the cardholders, or the first and last four digits of the card numbers.

Data redaction tools are being used by companies all over the world in order to hide and protect their sensitive data. Not only does it help in keeping the data secure, but also preserves its integrity and authenticity.

If you are reading up on data redaction, you would also come across another term: data masking. Both of these are tools used in data security, but they have some basic differences among them.

While data redaction is the process of removing certain pieces of sensitive or personally identifiable information, data masking is a process in which sensitive and authentic information is replaced with inauthentic information that has the same structure.

Data masking is mostly used for creating sample data for testing or training purposes, so that any personally identifiable information or sensitive data isn’t exposed or manipulated during the production or testing phase in an organization. This method also keeps the data structure and data types intact, so that data can be used in applications.

On the other hand, data redaction is used to conceal personally identifiable or classified information from comprehendible data, so that any sensitive data doesn’t get leaked to the public.

Therefore, we can safely say that while data redaction is a method to ‘remove’ data, data masking is a method to ‘replace’ data with something in a similar format. In many cases, data redaction is considered to be a sub-type of data masking.

When you redact sensitive data, the specific portion of the information is actually removed to maintain data security. Naturally, this would compel you to think: Can redacted data be restored?

Earlier, people used to add a black box over sensitive information in Microsoft Word files and convert them to PDF. However, this meant that anyone with access to the Word file would be able to remove the black box and reveal the information underneath.

In the more advanced versions of PDF readers and even Word, you can’t retrieve information once it has been redacted, which makes it much more secure than the previous versions.

In essence, you can’t restore redacted data unless you have a copy of the original file with you, or you have some highly experienced and expert data engineers who can access the metadata and do it for you.

This is why data redaction is a highly effective and useful method for protecting sensitive data, but it also requires you to store your original data properly, so that no one can access it.

Satori, The DataSecOps platform, provides dynamic data redaction and data masking, regardless of the data store your users’ access.

Book a demo with one of our experts or learn more:

• Fine-Grained Access Control
• Decentralized Data Access Workflows